BOB MINTON: I've got--I've got a host of material up here to
try to go over in a relatively short amount of time, but--thank
you very much for having me here, number one. Um, the lighting
up here, by the way, is terrible; I'm gonna have to hold this
closer to me because I can't even see it down here on the
podium.

In 1975, an organization calling itself United Churches of
Florida moved into Clearwater. Its representatives paid cash
for the Fort Harrison Hotel. And the community was excited
about the prospects of a group which was a coalition of what
they thought was a coalition of Christian churches coming into
Florida and into Clearwater, holding conventions and helping to
revitalize downtown. Uh, however, Mayor Gabe Cazares was the
first one to discover the truth about who this really was.
Outraged, he announced to a stunned community that the United
Churches of Florida did not exist; it was really the Church of
Scientology who had bought the plot of the Fort Harrison Hotel.

A press release issued by the Church of Scientology spokesman
Arte Maren attempted to downplay the significance of their
having purchased this property under false pretenses. And in
that press release he said, "Well, I hope the Mayor can put an
end to his concern that the city of Clearwater is being taken
over by Mafia hoods", unquote. As Mayor Cazares would discover
to his horror, the city of Clearwater had been taken over by
something even worse: A ruthless, criminal cult with
totalitarian aspirations.

The press release went on to say that, to explain rather
grandiosely, that United Churches of Florida was Scientology's
answer to gigantic government, huge international corporations
and a dominated media. Quote, "We want the churches of the
United States and eventually the world to unite as a force
within society, to change our world for the better, to unite as
one voice on social matters and present-day concerns."

Twenty-five years later there is indeed a matter of great
present-day concern; but it is not what the extravagant words
this press release intended. For Mayor Gabe Cazares and for all
of us here at this conference, that concern is the continuing,
relentless take-over of a sizable American city by the cult
that calls itself the Church of Scientology.

Back in 1977 when, when the U.S. government raided the church's
three offices of the Church of Scientology, among those 48,600
documents that they seized from these three locations was
information about how the church planned to take over the city
of Clearwater, Florida in Project Normandy.

Um, Mayor Cazares at the time, as you know, fought fiercely
against this organization. Gabe Cazares is very much involved
in this organization today called the Lisa McPherson Trust
which we have set up in downtown Clearwater. (holding up
pages)You know, two days ago I met with Gabe and these were his
three pages of handwritten notes for our little pow-wow about
things we needed to do in Clearwater to--particularly over the
course of the next six months--to try to keep this ultimate
take-over that Scientology plans for Clearwater under check, or
in check.

Um, to give you an idea of the present-day atmosphere in
Clearwater, on February the 24th, Stacy Brooks--who is the
president of the Lisa McPherson Trust--and I met with Mike
Roberto, who is the City Manager in Clearwater, together with
Pam Akin, Clearwater's City Attorney. And we went there in an
effort to continue an education process of Mr. Roberto in terms
of who the organization was that the city of Clearwater had
decided to cozy up to, rather closely in our opinion and rather
dangerously.

Well, Mr. Roberto said to us that he spent the last two years
since he came to Clearwater as City Manager trying to get the
Church of Scientology off the front pages of the local
newspapers in Tampa-St. Pete. And BOOM! The Lisa McPherson
Trust comes to Clearwater in January year 2000, and the Church
of Scientology is back on the front pages of the local
newspaper. The city of Clearwater doesn't like that. Mr.
Roberto said that it's bad for business. It is bad for economic
development in Clearwater. It is bad for development of the,
um, bayfront that they have in downtown Clearwater. He said
every time that your organization's conflict with Scientology
spills over and affects the business community in this town, we
are gonna do everything we can to shut you down.

Now, Mr. Roberto didn't mean shutting down the organization
specifically, he meant shutting down whatever those activities
were, and the city of Clearwater, as any city in the United
States, has a very, very broad range of possibilities to
curtail activities that--of any nature; and especially when it
regards something called a church.

There's--I would refer you to a Cornell Law Review article in
November 1999 if you want to get an idea of the types of laws
and the ways the courts in this country are moving towards
picketing near or around churches. Uh, there are some pretty
chilling things in there, pretty chilling weapons that, that
communities or cities have to fight people who are protesting
the activities of an organization like the Church of
Scientology.

Well, basically, Mr. Roberto's messages was that, you know,
moral crusaders are not welcome in Clearwater. He suggested
that perhaps, uh, Los Angeles or Washington or Boston or even
Dunedin would be a better place for us to be. In fact he said,
"You know, the City Manager in Dunedin is a very close friend
of mine. I could get you waterfront property there if you
prefer" (laughter) "rather than your location next to the
Church of Scientology in Clearwater bank building."

Well, Mr. Roberto went on to explain that the city of
Clearwater had spent a lot of money over 20 years investigating
the Church of Scientology and they never even wrote them a
parking ticket. Uh, he said the federal government wasn't
interested, the FBI passed, passed the buck, they weren't
interested after the 1977 raids and the 1980 convictions, you
know; after that, it was over as far as they were concerned. So
Mr. Roberto said, "Why should the city of Clearwater devote any
money into this effort?" You know, they even instructed the,
the Clearwater Police Department--from October of last year
they can no longer gather any intelligence information on
Scientology and its activities in the community. It's--you
know, talking about making a deal with the Devil. I, I mean,
the new management in Clearwater has been literally starting to
make a deal with the Devil because it's good for business. If
Scientology is not on the front pages of the paper, perhaps we
could make, uh, the, the city of Clearwater grow. We can have
developers come in and build high-rise condominiums all along
the waterfront and, you know, before it's over it'll look like,
like the coast of Spain, and the church will be part anyway.
Um, this--this was a fairly discouraging, uh, response that we
got from Mr. Roberto and the City Attorney. But, um, we told
him that, you know, it really isn't the public sector's
responsibility to fight organizations like this; it is a
private sector responsibility. And we, the Lisa McPherson
Trust, should be embraced by the public sector for what we're
here trying to do--to educate this community about what
Scientology is.

When we opened our doors on January the 5th, we--we started
getting calls immediately from citizens of Clearwater talking
about their concerns about Scientology, about how happy they
were that we were there, about how they were--they were, they
always look at Scientology with some sort of mysterious shroud
over it, that they were invited to community events many times
just--you know, they have a practice of going around and
speaking to various community groups, and they said, "When we
asked questions, they never answer our questions, you know,
they give us a run-around when we ask them questions. We'd
really like to know--we'd like for somebody to honestly answer
questions about what Scientology is." And, you know, I
explained to them that we have a number of former
Scientologists working here at the Lisa McPherson Trust who
will be glad to sit down and answer each and every question you
have.

Um, however, the one interesting aspect of the, the people that
we have talked to in Clearwater--not only called, but they,
they, particularly the first few weeks we were there, they were
coming in, into the office just to say "Hello", to introduce
themselves, to offer to volunteer. We do have a small staff of
volunteers now, they're manning the phones, doing scanning, you
know, all sorts of extraordinarily useful things that none of
us seem to have the time to do because we spend a lot of time
on the phone.

But one thing about these people in Clearwater is they are
frightened of Scientology. They live in a community, it's
roughly 100,000 people in Clearwater, I think there's 74,300
registered voters--and they genuinely have a fear of the Church
of Scientology. You know, a lot of people who call say, you
know "Look, I'm having to call you from a pay phone because I
don't want any phone record or anything on my bill that I've
talked to anybody at the Lisa McPherson Trust, because we're
afraid of the recriminations that Scientology might pull on
us."

We've had vol--we've had people come in from the community who
picketed with us down in Clearwater who had volunteered to do
with us and, for example, one family, a husband and wife and a
child that came, they, they spent considerable time with us
learning more about Scientology. They picketed with us several
times and--what happens next? I mean, they helped us also with
our brochures, with the guys in graphic arts, um, they helped
us with the brochures and things of that nature, and then what
happens next is a group of Scientologists come to their
neighborhood and start going around asking questions about the
husband and the wife. And believe me, that type of thing has a
chilling effect on somebody's commitment to getting involved in
a battle against the Church of Scientology. I mean, they do
extract a heavy price from anybody who is willing to stand up
and actively criticize them. And there are plenty of people in
this room that you can ask who have experienced that, the wrath
of the Church of Scientology.

Now, just--before I go into the, the next aspect here, I want
to talk about Scientologists a little bit. I mean, at least 95%
of Scientologists are totally wonderful, good, decent people,
maybe even 100%. But certainly the 95% that I've run across on
a regular basis are incredibly nice, decent people. It is a
very, very small group of people within the Church of
Scientology who are aspiring totalitarian leaders. They
have--they run this organization in a, in a Nazi-like manner.
They intimidate people into doing--they intimidate people into
being controlled so incredibly significantly beyond belief to
me.

But we have--one of the most surprising things about what we've
been doing in the Lisa McPherson Trust is we're talking to a
lot of current Scientologists. We're not talking with many Sea
Org people because this is the, you know, the paramilitary
wing, a very, very highly conditioned group within the Church
of Scientology who is very hard to get through to. But the
public Scientologists have been out there on the Internet for
several years, and many of these people have come, come and
talked to me and said, you know, "We would have never, ever
thought about speaking to Bob Minton, but we've followed your
activities, we've followed the critics' activities and the, the
conflict, really between the Church of Scientology and the
Internet over the last three or four years." And it has given
them enough strength and courage to actually come out and talk
to one of the most evil people on the planet! (laughter, then
applause) And, you know, I think this is a really big
accomplishment in that we've only been in Clearwater for, um,
two and a half months.

And to be talking not just--I say I'm talking with current
Scientologists, we're not talking with low-level
Scientologists, we have talked with some of those as well--but
we're talking to people who have reached the height of
Scientology's Bridge to Total Freedom; OT8's, OT7's. You know,
these are people who have been in Scientology for 15, 20 years,
they are leaders in the Clearwater community of Scientologists
in the field--the Scientology field, as they call it--in
Clearwater. But these people don't like the totalitarian aspect
of Scientology. They are finding out that they don't have to
put up with it. They are finding out the various possibilities
to get all of their money back. We are helping people get
$700,000 back, $600,000 back, $300,000 back from the Church of
Scientology. (applause)

This, this is a money machine. It is a money machine. They are
stealing people's money. You know, we, we sit and we listen to
the stories from a lady whose husband died, she's an elderly
lady. She had children in Scientology. She got involved to be
closer to the children. The husband died, he had a lot of
money. The reg for Scientology comes to her house the night her
husband died and will not leave until he gets the $700,000 that
he already knows the husband is giving the wife. And he got it.
But this lady is getting it back. She is tired--she was tired
of being ripped off by Scientology.

We are in Clearwater to make sure that the people in Clearwater
learn about the true nature of this organization, about the
abusive and deceptive practices that Scientology gets away with
on its own members. And we are there to help Scientologists get
their money back, help them with their divorce situation, with
their spouse who is still remaining in Scientology and the
father or the mother wants to leave.

We have--we have mothers calling us about their cus--their
child custody cases where the father is now, because of the
Scientology, she, you know, she fell into a trap. This one
particular woman, she fell into this trap of letting the
Scientology judicial system help them solve their divorce
cases, their divorce case and then their child custody case.
The mother is, no longer has any visitation privileges with her
own child. Because her Scientology friends abandoned her. They
were the ones who were allowed to--the only ones who were
allowed to do supervised court, supervised visits, custody--you
know, she had to have some supervision when she visited as a
result of this arrangement that they worked out with the Church
of Scientology's justice system.

Well, people are getting fed up with it. Scientologists are
getting fed up with it. I guarantee you, I'm fed up with it. I
would--I would like nothing better to be doing something else
other than fighting with the Church of Scientology. But they
are ruining people's lives. They are--I mean, our conference
here is about human rights. Scientology deprives its members of
human rights. Every Scientologist has a right to believe in the
Scientology technology if that's what they wanna believe in.
But the Church of Scientology does not have the right to abuse
people's human rights, to attack everyone who speaks out
against them, and it has to stop. And the Lisa McPherson Trust
is just one more in a long line of organizations who have, and
people who have been fighting Scientology and will continue to
fight Scientology. Until this organization reforms as best it
can to the norms of society. (applause). Thank you very much.